Interviewed at Tekion for a Senior Software Engineer role. Interestingly, my LLD/HLD round was conducted by a DATA Engineer. Not sure if that was intentional cross-functional innovation or just resource optimization.
Was given two major LLD problems in 50 minutes:
* Design Movie Ticket Booking System
* Design Dropbox-like File Upload System
Apparently the expectation was to deeply discuss architecture, scalability, entities, APIs, tradeoffs, concurrency, storage, etc. — all while speedrunning the thought process.
The interview felt extremely rushed from start to finish. Requirement clarification (which is literally part of system design) was treated like a nuisance. Every time I tried clarifying assumptions, the interviewer wanted to skip ahead because he seemed more interested in hearing pre-decided buzzwords than understanding the design process.
One highlight was being told I missed adding “language” in the Movie entity. :)
Glad we caught that. The distributed locking strategy could wait.
The second question was even better:
Initially described as a middleware system.
I clarified: “So basically middleware?”
Interviewer: “Yes.”
5 minutes later:
“No no, think of it as a service.”
Cool cool. Love evolving requirements mid-interview with zero acknowledgment.
What makes it funnier is that all questions were actually answered correctly. Covered DB choices, APIs, upload flow, scalability concerns, storage abstraction, async processing, etc. Still got rejected within 2 hours with no feedback what so ever.
Also somewhere in between, I was asked:
“What is the difference between SQL and NoSQL?”
For a Senior SWE interview in 2026.
At this point I think candidates are expected to be mind readers, architects, database historians, and speed typists simultaneously.
Interviewers should probably prepare before taking interviews instead of running random question generators with a stopwatch.
